E-Safety

What does CEOP do?

The NCA's CEOP Command (formerly the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) works with child protection partners across the UK and overseas to identify the main threats to children and coordinates activity against these threats to bring offenders to account. We protect children from harm online and offline, directly through NCA led operations and in partnership with local and international agencies.

Our approach is holistic. Officers in CEOP and across the NCA who specialise in this area of criminality work side by side with professionals from the wider child protection community and industry.

Intelligence developed in the NCA intelligence hub informs NCA-CEOP operational deployments, steers our development of new capabilities and underpins our dedicated ThinkUKnow education programme for children of all ages, parents and carers.

Responsibilities

We pursue those who sexually exploit and abuse children, prevent people becoming involved in child sexual exploitation, protect children from becoming victims of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, and prepare interventions to reduce the impact of child sexual exploitation and abuse through safeguarding and child protection work.

Our activity in each of these areas is underpinned by specialist teams in the CEOP command, and across the whole agency.

We work to track registered offenders who have a sexual interest in children and who have failed to comply with their notification requirements under the Sexual Offences Act 2003. This includes disrupting or preventing travel by offenders and disseminating intelligence to international forces and specifically targeting offenders while they remain overseas. It includes non UK nationals who travel to the UK.

We also focus on organised criminal groups profiteering from the publication or distribution of child abuse images, support local police forces with computer forensics and covert investigations and provide authoritative investigative advice and support to maximise UK law enforcement's response to crimes of child sexual abuse and exploitation.

We liaise with the online and technological industries, fine-tuning guidelines to minimise the possibility of present and future technology increasing the risk of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse to children. Our training and education specialists work together to raise the knowledge, skills and understanding of parents, carers, children and young people.

The CEOP command receives invaluable assistance from its partners and supporters in the UK and internationally, allowing us to do even more groundbreaking child protection work.